Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 48.djvu/50

Reynolds was voted to the chair, and after he had spoken, the resolution was put and carried. Crowds escorted him down the Strand to his house in Wellington Street, from the balcony of which he addressed his riotous supporters. Reynolds thus definitely allied himself with the chartists, and was at once accepted as a leader. On 13 March he presided at a demonstration on Kennington Common to express sympathy with the French revolutionists; and in the national convention of chartists which met in the John Street Institution on 4 April he represented Derby. He took an active part in the deliberations, and on the second day of the sittings made a violent speech against further delay in bringing the issues between the government and the chartists to a crisis. He opposed the presentation of a national memorial to the queen, and moved that, in the event of the rejection of the petition by parliament, the convention as constituted should declare its sitting permanent and decree the charter to be the law of the land. Derby nominated him as its delegate for the national assembly which the convention decided should be called if parliament rejected the petition, but he declined election owing to pressure of literary work. He busily engaged in the arrangements for the great meeting on Kennington Common on 10 April, which proved a fiasco. During the next twelve months he strove to stem the chartist reaction, and at the end of 1849, when there was hope of further successful action, he was chosen to represent Tower Hamlets at the meeting of the metropolitan delegates. He presided at the inaugural meeting of J. Bronterre O'Brien's National Reform League, and addressed chartist meetings in the early spring of 1850 in the midlands and north of England, and in Scotland. In May he issued an address and threatened to contest Finsbury against the radical members, one of whom was T. S. Duncombe, but nothing followed. On the resignation of the chartist executive in 1850 to test the strength of Feargus O'Connor [q. v.] in the party, Reynolds stood for re-election as an opponent of O'Connor, and was elected at the top of the poll with 1805 votes. On 31 March 1851 he was present at the convention which assembled at the Parthenium Rooms, St. Martin's Lane, to promulgate a new chartist policy; but on 24 Sept. following he resigned his place on the executive, and at the same time withdrew from a parliamentary contest in Bradford to which he had pledged himself. His last connection with chartism was in 1856, when he was chairman of the Feargus O'Connor monument committee. His advice was generally in favour of extreme measures, and in the quarrels of the party he sided with O'Brien first against O'Connor and then against Ernest Jones [see O'Brien, James Bronterre].

His later years were almost exclusively devoted to journalism. He had started ‘Reynolds's Political Instructor,’ which during a short life circulated thirty thousand a week. But when he brought that periodical to a close in 1850, he started in its stead ‘Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper,’ of which the first number was published, at the price of 4d., on Sunday, 5 May 1850. The new paper at once became the mouthpiece of republican and advanced working-class opinion, and still maintains its reputation as an advocate of independent and extreme political views. To its production Reynolds devoted himself during the last twenty years of his life, and except through its columns did not appear much in public. He died at his residence in Woburn Square, London, 17 June 1879.